


The First Casualty

by anactoria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode: s10e17 Inside Man, Gen, Ghosts, Mark of Cain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 22:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3706225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoria/pseuds/anactoria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU take on 10.17. Sam takes a walk in the veil, and meets an old ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Casualty

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this before 10.17, based on the seance scene in the promo, but didn't get around to finishing it before the episode aired, so I guess now it's an AU.
> 
> Thanks so much to [frozen_delight](http://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_delight/) for her beta help and suggestions. :)

The fog is so thick Sam doesn’t dare step off the path, and it doesn’t behave like it should. 

The fog, that is. Not the path. How that’s supposed to behave, where it’s supposed to be taking him, Sam doesn’t know. The fog, though—it rolls like smoke, like a cheap special effect, instead of hanging heavy in the still air. Shapes form and dissolve in it. Sam thinks he sees figures, faces, looming toward him, but when he blinks there’s nobody there.

He doesn’t even remember how he got here. Last he remembers, he was with Cas in Oliver Pryce’s front room, candle flames flaring as Pryce’s eyes rolled back in his head and he spoke in a voice that wasn’t his own. Something about somebody on the other side who wanted to help them.

And now Sam’s here, placing one foot in front of the other like a little kid balancing along the top of a wall, everything more than two feet in front of his face white-shrouded and indistinct. There are shadows out there in the fog that might be trees, but Sam can’t be sure. He didn’t notice any woods when they were driving up to Pryce’s place, but then he isn’t a hundred percent certain he’s even in the physical world anymore. Everything’s blank.

Sam squints out into the fog, and then—maybe—he sees something. A flicker of movement up ahead. 

Then it’s gone.

Sam frowns and quickens his pace. “Hello?” he calls out into the mist, but his voice doesn’t carry; sounds flat in the damp air. There’s no reply. He strains his eyes turning on the spot.

There. A shadow, just briefly visible. Still ahead of him, following the path but off to the side of it, not close enough for Sam to tell who—or what—it is.

“Hey,” he calls, louder this time. “Who’s there?”

Still no answer. Sam breaks into a jog—careful to stay on the path—and the figure darts off into the mist.

A break opens up in the fog a nanosecond before the figure vanishes, and yeah, it’s a person, or a thing that looks like a person anyway. Barely comes up to Sam’s shoulder. A woman or a kid, he guesses, but can’t focus on whoever it is long enough to be sure. They’re always a few steps ahead of him, even when he breaks into a run, so he slows back down and keeps quiet. Maybe they’ll come to him if they don’t feel like they’re being chased.

He’s peering out into the fog, trying to catch another glimpse, so he doesn’t see the house until he’s almost on top of it.

Actually, ‘house’ is kind of a strong word for it. It’s more of a cottage, a squat gray stone building with a thatched roof, woodsmoke trailing out the chimney to mingle with the fog. The path Sam has been following stops right at its open door.

“Is this were you were taking me?” Sam asks his shadow in the fog. 

He isn’t really expecting an answer, and he doesn’t get one. There’s no sign of movement up ahead. 

Sam stands there a moment longer, listening. Then he walks in the door.

 

\----

 

When he sees who’s sitting at the kitchen table, he stops dead. His hand goes to the back of his waistband, instinct kicking in and taking over, though something tells him guns will be no use here.

“Cain.” His voice comes out hoarse.

“Close.” The man at the table looks up and meets his eyes. “But no.”

Sam blinks back at him. The guy looks just like Cain, in profile. The same stern set to his face; the same nose; the same piercing eyes. Something of the same unsettling quiet in his manner.

His face is younger, though, and he doesn’t have the grandiose facial hair thing going on. Plus there’s something different about the jawline, something a little more open in his expression. Not Cain, then, but the resemblance is unmistakable. 

Sam stares.

“Are you—?”

“Yes.” And Abel—because who the hell else would it be?—waves a hand. “Sit down, Sam.”

Sam does as he’s told, still a little dazed by the surrealism of—well, of whatever’s going on here. Looks around. 

The cottage is neat; homey. There’s a fire burning low in the grate, bunches of drying herbs hanging from the beam above their heads. A bunch of flowers—bright purple spars—stand in a pot on the windowsill. It looks real.

There’s a loaf of some kind of coarse, brown bread on the table in front of them. A little earthenware jar. Abel looks at them instead of at Sam; runs his fingers over the perfect domed top of the loaf. 

“Was it you?” Sam says. “The spirit Pryce talked to? Is that why I’m here? Where _is_ here?”

Abel looks up from his loaf of bread and smiles faintly. “Where would you expect to find a spirit with unfinished business?”

Sam frowns. “The veil?” he says. “But this is all—” He breaks off; raps the tabletop with his knuckles. It sounds solid.

“It does look that way, doesn’t it?” Abel looks steadily at him. “This is the oldest part of the veil. Think about it. We spirits manifest ourselves through the strength of our feelings. But those manifestations—really, they’re just memories. Memories of what it was like to have a body, to take up space. With enough time, don’t you think a spirit could learn to manifest other memories? Imaginings? Things it wants?”

“So this is one of your memories?”

Abel shrugs. “Parts of it.” He picks up the bread again and breaks off a hunk. Lifts the lid off of the jar and pours something thick and amber-colored onto the bread.

Honey, Sam realizes. It’s honey.

“Don’t take offense,” Abel tells him. “I’d break bread with you—don’t think I wouldn’t. But you’ve read enough stories about visiting the dead to know better.”

Sam leans forward in his chair. “And you didn’t bring me here for brunch. What do you want?”

“There’s nothing I want from you, Sam.” Abel sighs. “It isn’t about that. It’s about what you need from me, and what you need is to hear this.” His face is solemn. “What you have to do: it’s okay. It’s the right thing.”

“What I have to do?” Sam asks. “What’s that supposed to mean?” His voice comes out hard, though, and there’s ice in his gut. He’s no good at pretending.

“You know,” Abel tells him. “You’ve known since your brother walked out of that barn, since he killed _my_ brother. You saw him become a monster once, and you won’t let that happen again. You love him too dearly for that.”

Sam crosses his arms. “So, you’re saying—what? That I have to do to Dean what Cain did to you? That Cain was right?”

Abel actually laughs, soft and regretful. “No,” he says, at last. “Cain believed he was doing the right thing—that, I don’t doubt. But if I had my time again, I’d get there first. I’d save him from himself. And maybe I’d burn in Hell for it. Maybe I’d become a common-or-garden demon, like the ones you hunt. But I would take that risk.”

Sam’s heart sinks. “Cain was delusional?” he asks. “He wasn’t really saving you from anything?” 

_He wasn’t mad then_ , Dean said.

Sam only got Cain’s side of the story secondhand, from Dean. Lucifer had his claws into Abel; Cain killed him to save him from Hell. It was obvious enough that Dean believed that, and so Sam didn’t ask if he’d considered the other possibility. 

Sam considered it, though. He’s spent whole nights considering it.

Abel shrugs. “You know what it’s like,” he says, and his eyes cut right through Sam. “Having _him_ inside your head. He’s a hell of a storyteller. Weaving his lies right into the fabric of what you know until you can’t unpick them anymore. Until you might never be sure of what’s real ever again.”

Sam winces, pushes down the pieces of memory that threaten to surface in his mind’s eye. The office block turning into an abandoned warehouse when he stepped inside. Lucifer wearing Dean’s face. The locked white room on the psych ward, sleeplessness crawling at the edges of his vision. Yes, he knows what it’s like.

But Abel still hasn’t answered his question. 

“Are you talking about you?” he demands. “Or Cain?”

“Does it really matter?” Abel waves a hand. There’s mist curling in through the window, trailing its damp fingers down the back of Sam’s neck. “What I remember, what Cain remembers, what somebody wrote down in a book a few thousand years later… they’re all just stories. Who’s to say what’s real?”

His expression has turned distant, eyes narrowed on some distant horizon. Then he blinks and he’s back in the room again, instead of looking for—whatever he was looking for.

Despite the mist, despite the old stone walls of the cottage, Sam hasn’t felt cold since he got here. Now, he shivers.

“The point,” Abel goes on, “is that it doesn’t matter how it happened—or how I remember it, or how he remembers it. What matters is it _did_ happen. My brother became a monster, and I did nothing to stop it.”

The smile fades from his face, and suddenly Abel looks _old_. It’s there in the exhaustion in his eyes, the weight of eons in the slump of his shoulders. 

Sam swallows around a lump in his throat.

“That’s your unfinished business,” he says. “Why you didn’t end up in Heaven.” He frowns. “But Cain’s dead now. He’s gone. So why aren’t you…” He trails off, glancing up. Honestly, he half-expects to see Heaven when he looks up—a swirl of stars or a veil of celestial light, shining down at him through the ceiling—but all that greets him is the dark underside of the cottage roof, bunches of rosemary and sage hanging from its smoke-darkened beams.

“Every ghost has its tether,” Abel tells him. “I’m sure you can guess mine.”

“So,” Sam says. “If we destroy the Blade—?”

They’ve looked for ways before, of course, but that turned into a dead end pretty fast, and the Mark seemed like the real problem anyway. 

Somehow, though, this whole thing makes it seem more urgent. Symbolic. Not just a practical thing; not just getting the most obvious form of temptation out of Dean’s way. 

Not that the whole thing wasn’t lousy with symbolism already, but Sam’s been doing his best to put that particular set of fears out his mind; to treat Genesis like a puzzle to be decoded for answers, not a prophecy. Dean’s already obsessing enough for both of them, and it hasn’t gotten him any closer to a cure. But now—with Symbol Number Two sitting right in front of him—Sam can’t exactly avoid the subject. Abel doesn’t seem like much of a restless spirit, or a danger to anybody, but helping him move on might be just what they need. 

Then, maybe, this could stop being about Cain and Abel and start being about Sam and Dean again.

They saved the world that way once before, didn’t they? Wresting their futures away from Lucifer and Michael. Taking back the story.

Abel shakes his head, though. “You can’t,” he says. “Not without destroying the Mark first.”

Sam’s heart sinks. “And there’s no way to do that.”

“There’s one way to do that.”

“I won’t.” Sam looks at Abel, hard. “I told you. I won’t do that.”

He doesn’t know what kind of an answer he’s expecting, but Abel shrugs and looks past him, inclines his head toward the open window.

Sam follows the line of his gaze, and he can’t help his sharp intake of breath. “Dean?”

Only, it isn’t _his_ Dean, the Dean who’s probably drinking himself into a stupor back at the bunker right now. It’s Dean how he looked at that witch’s cottage, fourteen years old and as close to innocent as their lives have ever let them get. He cracks a smile that’s painful to watch.

“Sammy,” he says. “Sammy, it’s okay.”

Sam recognizes it—how he says it. It’s the voice Dean used when they were kids, and Dad had been gone too long and the grocery money was running out. Or when Dad came home and packed them into the car and dragged them away from the school they’d just gotten used to and the friends they’d just made, and Sam sat in the middle of the floor and refused to get up, yelling about how unfair it all was, and Dean or Dad had to pick him up bodily and deposit him in the backseat.

Or when Dean was damned to Hell and Sam was running out of time and answers; they kept slipping through his fingers while Dean kept smiling, and then it was too late and Sam was left with empty hands and palms sticky with Dean’s blood.

Or after the fight with Metatron, Dean bleeding out in his arms, dying quick but not painless, choking out, “It’s better this way,” on one of those awful, rattling breaths that are gonna haunt Sam to his own dying day.

Dean says “It’s okay” a whole lot, and it’s never okay.

He’s still standing at the window. Kid-Dean, with his too-sad smile and the too-old look in his eyes. Sam gets to his feet, takes a step toward the window. He isn’t sure what he intends to do. Reach out and stop Dean from running off ahead of him again? Tell him that no, it isn’t okay—as if fourteen-year-old Dean was ever any less stubborn, any more likely to listen to him, than pushing-forty Dean is?

He does neither, because before he makes it to the window, Dean ducks back into the fog and is gone.

Sam stares after him. Turns back to Abel, who spreads his hands and says nothing, resting his case.

 

\----

 

Sam doesn’t remember leaving the cottage. He was there, and now he’s back out in the fog, the path nowhere in sight, threading his way through the trees, turning and turning and finding no sign of Dean. 

The damp air sits heavy on his lungs. He wonders if this is how drowning feels.

_Sam._

He starts, turns on the spot. No Dean.

 _Sam_ , he hears again, more insistent now. _Sam!_

He blinks. Once, twice, and then the fog and the forest and the cottage are gone, snatched away like smoke on the wind.

Cas is saying his name, right up in his face, his breath foul with coffee and his eyes shadowed with worry. 

Sam winces and sits up in his chair. There’s a crick in his neck that’s working itself up into a tension headache, and his throat is dry.

He swallows. Frowns and licks his lips, ignoring the puzzled look Cas gives him. Tells himself he’s only imagining the taste of honey.

 

\----

 

It’s late when they pull off the highway into Lebanon. A clear night, the stars bright and staring. Sam finds himself wishing for clouds. Fog, maybe.

Cas sits grim-faced in the driver’s seat. They haven’t spoken much since they hit the road, which suits Sam fine. His head is still throbbing, a dull ache at the base of his skull, and when he closes his eyes he keeps seeing Dean’s faces superimposed on top of each other, kid-Dean and present-day-Dean, and if he lets himself drift too far toward sleep, Dean with black eyes and a cold, cold smile on his face.

“Hold up,” Sam says, before Cas can make the turn up the road to the bunker.

Cas pulls over and kills the engine, but keeps his eyes on the road. “Sam,” he says. He speaks slowly, choosing his words. “Pryce was always a long shot. But we’ll keep trying. We’ll find something—”

“I know,” Sam says. “I know we will.” He wonders how convinced he even sounds anymore. Takes a breath, deep and heavy. “That wasn’t what I wanted to say.”

Cas turns to look at him, frowns.

Sam wets his lips. “The First Blade,” he says. “What did you do with it?”

Cas looks at him carefully. “You have to understand,” he says. “You can’t tell Dean. However much you might want to trust him. However much either of us might want to.”

“I get it,” Sam tells him. “Believe me, I do. I won’t tell Dean.” 

Cas nods, apparently satisfied.

It’s not a lie. Sam’s not even sure what he does intend to do with the knowledge. It’s just that he keeps hearing Abel’s voice, echoing around the inside of his skull. It’s just that he keeps seeing those big, sad teenage eyes turning black.

Maybe he won’t do anything with it. Maybe he won’t have to. Maybe Abel’s version of the story can stay just that: a might-have-been, locked away inside Sam’s head, safely separate from what he knows to be real.

He looks out the window. 

How cold the stars are. How all-seeing. If clarity was comfort, then Sam ought to be feeling pretty good right about now.

But, “I’ll tell you,” Cas says, and Sam tears his eyes away from the empty heavens and wishes he could pray for forgiveness.


End file.
